Oswego Alumni Magazine » Japanhttp://www.oswego.edu/magazine
Oswego Alumni Magazine Wordpress siteFri, 30 Jan 2015 20:35:19 +0000en-UShourly1http://wordpress.org/?v=4.0.1Student’s origami aids Japanhttp://www.oswego.edu/magazine/2011/08/24/student%e2%80%99s-origami-aids-japan/
http://www.oswego.edu/magazine/2011/08/24/student%e2%80%99s-origami-aids-japan/#commentsWed, 24 Aug 2011 20:31:01 +0000http://oswego.edu/magazine/?p=1490Ed. Note: A version of this story was originally published in the March 24, 2011, edition of The Oswegonian.

Amanda Woomer ’12 has made so many tiny colored paper cranes that now, as she carries on a conversation, she doesn’t notice her hands meticulously completing each fold to produce a finished crane.

In fact, she only notices what she is doing when she sets the finished crane on the table and starts on another. The intricate piece of origami is roughly the size of a matchbook and very delicate. In two minutes, she has transformed a 3-by-3-inch scrap of paper into a work of art. She is folding for her friends and for people she’s never met.

Amanda Woomer ’12 folded 1,000 origami cranes to aid Japan.

Woomer folded 1,000 cranes and raised $1,000 in just 19 days for the relief effort for victims of the tsunami that devastated Japan in March. She added 400 more cranes and $400 to that total by working through the end of the semester.

In Japanese culture, the crane is revered as a symbol of peace, longevity and good fortune. It is customary to fold a thousand paper cranes when making a special wish.

“Currently my wish is that Japan is just able to rebuild itself and overcome this,” Woomer said.

Japan is close to her heart.

Her grandfather served in the Marines in Japan during World War II. He fell in love with the people and culture, eventually living in Japan for several years after the war.

That love and appreciation of the culture just rubbed off on Woomer at a young age, she said.

“I want to do something and folding a thousand cranes, I feel like it’s the least that I can do,” Woomer said. “It kind of seems like a small task in comparison.”

His early search for professional work in the nonprofit industry was unsuccessful and the old summer job assembling subs at a chain sandwich joint was growing stale. He decided to go international with his search and landed on a job teaching English in Japan that he found listed online.

Ben Hurst ’10 teaches English to Japanese children at an elementary school in Chikusei, a city of about 110,000. Hurst kept his plan to teach abroad even after the country was struck by one of the worst disasters in its history March 11. He is on an 11-month contract.

“I’ve always been up for adventure,” the philosophy and psychology major said. When it came time to embark on his unusual and exciting job opportunity, Hurst had one more decision to make.

Would he still take his March 22 flight to a country that had just experienced one of the largest natural disasters in its history a week earlier?

“It was something that I really wanted to do,” said Hurst, who lives and works in Chikusei. “There’s such a need for support here.”

Many in the English teaching program and others like it fled after March 11 earthquakes rocked the country and compromised nuclear plants, creating serious danger of radiation exposure.

“My relatives in California are taking potassium iodine [to protect themselves], and here I am going into the heart of it,” he said. He and his fellow teachers who live in a common apartment complex have experienced tremors since they arrived.

But the work is satisfying and the experience worthwhile.

“I’m really glad I came,” said Hurst, who cited his experience interning for Oswego Health and taking philosophy courses on the mind and language as important tools for his journey.

After his 11-month contract is up, Hurst said he may come back to the U.S. for graduate school — he may study international relations — but, he’s also considering similar English teaching jobs abroad.

]]>http://www.oswego.edu/magazine/2011/08/24/recent-grad-helps-japan/feed/0Photo: Names for Japanhttp://www.oswego.edu/magazine/2011/08/24/photo-names-for-japan/
http://www.oswego.edu/magazine/2011/08/24/photo-names-for-japan/#commentsWed, 24 Aug 2011 20:28:54 +0000http://oswego.edu/magazine/?p=1715Psychology major Kiara Tull ’12, left, receives a bookmark with her name hand lettered in Japanese in return for a donation during a fundraising event March 25 for the American Red Cross relief to Japan’s Earthquake and tsunami catastrophes. Doing the lettering is Britnie West ’13, a TESOL major and Japanese Club secretary and instructor.

If you are one of the 100 million Americans with smart phones, chances are you are holding the work of a fellow Oswego alumnus.

Peter Bocko ’75, chief technology officer for Corning Glass Technologies, a business within Corning Inc., driving new glass opportunities, has spent his career developing and bringing to market glass used in cutting-edge high-tech devices like these. His latest project is Corning Gorilla Glass, a super-tough, ultra-thin product used in some of the hottest electronic devices on the planet.

You can feel its cool touch as it protects your new high-tech phone from scratches and bumps. Soon you can hang it on your wall and marvel at its sleek beauty: At this January’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, SONY announced that it would be using the durable material in select models of its Bravia line of LCD televisions.

Peter Bocko ’75

Other fruits of Bocko’s labor are less obvious. He and the display technology team are developing a flexible glass that will someday be used in the design of new e-readers and other emerging technologies. It provides advantages over current materials, and will help make e-books easier and more fun to read. And an earlier product of theirs — an environmentally friendly LCD glass with no added heavy metals — was especially important to one of Bocko’s Japanese clients, whose factory sits alongside a river.

Much of the Corning team’s work has been to produce thinner glass, and that, too, saves the environment. “You melt glass by the pound, sell it by the square foot,” Bocko explains. A 19-inch traditional TV — where the picture comes from a cathode ray tube or CRT display — uses 40 pounds of glass. A modern LCD set uses much less, in a sheet only 0.7 mm thick.

Bocko is passionate about glass. After 32 years at the world’s leader in specialty glass and ceramics and 22 years helping to make them a key player in LCD technology, this self-proclaimed “glass guy” can still get rhapsodic about the virtues of Corning’s newest achievement and the possibilities for the future.

Dressed in a sport jacket rather than a traditional lab coat, Bocko walks — and talks — fast. Leading a visitor through the maze of Corning’s research facility at Sullivan Park, his staccato delivery of facts, figures and anecdotes is dizzying. His mind is moving at a million miles a minute, too — always looking ahead to the next big thing.

That’s a habit rooted in the Corning way of doing business, he admits. “We work with key customers to give more value so they can’t do without us,” he says. “When they have product A, we are working on product B, proactively obsoleting our own product.”

People are key

In an irony not lost on the thoughtful scientist, Bocko says he was hired with the profits Corning earned from TV’s cathode ray tubes, then spent most of his career making CRT sets obsolete in favor of more efficient, environment-friendly and beautiful LCD TVs.

But if product is important to Bocko, people are more so. Relationships are valuable to him, and that is key to his success in the Asian market. “When you say something you have to mean it,” he says. “In Asia, you cannot treat business relationships casually.”

Case in point: His interview with Oswego magazine was postponed by a week, because he had to interrupt his Christmas vacation to make a last minute trip back to Japan. There was news that Bocko could not let a key customer hear from anyone else.

“They knew I flew 12,000 miles to be there for one two-hour meeting,” he says. But that courtesy showed them that he really valued their relationship. “They know they can trust me.”

Corning’s business is built “on the basis of relationship and trust — we give more value,” he will tell you. For 20 years he has worked almost exclusively with the LCD end of the business, helping corporate customers and their designers find uses for Corning’s products. “Orienting R&D not on what you think is a good idea but collaborating with the customer,” Bocko explains.

In his role as chief technology officer for Corning Glass Technologies, the relationships have to run in both directions. While he is working with customers to help design new uses for Corning technology, he also must interface with a team back in New York state’s Southern Tier to make the magic happen. That’s a juggling act that comes naturally for Bocko, since he led the team stateside — as a scientist himself — before his transition to Asia in 2007.

People skills are something he learned along with good science in Oswego, working with mentors like Distinguished Teaching Professors Emeriti Augustine Silveira and Ken Hyde. He admits to picking up style cues from Silveira, who had a unique classroom technique.

“The way he managed the classroom — he would value participation,” Bocko says. “He could make people feel he was really interested in them and valued their ideas.”

The Waterville native chose Oswego for its excellent reputation, especially in chemistry, and the opportunity to work one-on-one with scientists. He valued the personal attention he received at Oswego and how that translated into real-life lessons.

In working with Hyde, Bocko learned the value of good, hard, incremental work. “Chip away and there was insight,” is the message he took away from days — and nights — in the lab in Snygg Hall. “Science is not a matter of pure inspiration, just good, dogged work and inspiration will come.”

Those hours of hard work provided some laughs, though. Bocko fondly remembers the time he set his hand on fire. He was working with a flask that included ether. He held it over the flame from a Bunsen burner and it exploded, setting his hand on fire. He shook it like a match, and because the ether was so volatile, it went out almost immediately. But the laughs lingered to this day.

Then there was the time he burned his pants off. Bocko was doing some work for Hyde at 7 a.m. and dropped a half-gallon of sulphuric acid on his jeans. “Not a promising start,” he laughs. When Hyde came into the office, there was Bocko sitting in a lab coat, bare legs sticking out, waiting for his roommate to show up with spare jeans. “Pete burned off his pants,” said his lab partner. “Professor Hyde just shook his head,” remembers Bocko with a chuckle.

None of that deterred his ambition to obtain a Ph.D. and “do science that really mattered.” Bocko knew from his high school years that he wanted to be a research chemist, practicing science at a level that mattered: Not doing chores for others, but setting policy and direction.

Oswego played an important role in fulfilling that goal. The research he did — and the scientific articles he published with his Oswego professors — helped him gain admission to a prestigious doctoral program at Cornell University.

Oswego played another important role in his life — it’s where he met his wife of 35 years, Andrea Guglielmo Bocko ’73, M ’75.

They were both working at an Oswego chemistry lab one summer, Pete on copper complexes and Andrea on cobalt complexes with pyridine, which Pete calls “one of the most foul substances known to man. It smells like a sneaker worn by Bigfoot,” he says with a laugh. Andrea brought her pyridine into the lab and, well, Pete couldn’t help but notice her.

“I always liked smart girls — a girl in a lab coat,” he says, with a grin. So when he met Andrea, he made up his mind after the first date. “I’m going to marry this girl,” he told his brother.

How Bocko became Corning’s chief technology officer in Asia has its own story.

“People underestimate the amount of resolve it takes to develop a new product,” he says. He joined Corning in 1979 as a glass researcher, and became part of an exploratory LCD team in 1982. In 1988, he became full-time head of product development for LCD development, but through budget cuts he lost his team because Corning was not sure of the market potential.

“So I spent time traveling, making relationships with the companies that would use the glass, [people in] Japan, Korea, Taiwan and, now, China.”

Put simply, he says, “We make the glass, the customer makes the LCD: We want to enable them to make their product the best it can be and as economically as possible.”

So he has spent the better part of two decades traveling back and forth between Corning and Asia, and now makes his full-time home in Tokyo, traveling back to Corning for meetings at least a dozen times a year.

Each flight is about 7,000 miles and takes 15 hours. “I’ve spent six months of my life in a 747,” he quips.

Whether up in the air or in the lab, Bocko is thinking fast, working hard and bringing new products to market that will improve peoples’ lives everywhere.

When Peter ’75 and Andrea Guglielmo Bocko ’73, M ’75 decided to pull up roots in New York’s Southern Tier and resettle in Tokyo to be closer to Pete’s work, it meant big changes for the family. Pete was busy with his work at Corning Inc., but Andrea (above, at left) had taken an early retirement from a teaching job she loved in the Corning-Painted Post school district.

Making a new life as an expat in Japan could have left Andrea frustrated. She could have stayed isolated, socializing only with fellow foreigners.

Instead, she chose to embrace the local culture, give back to her new community and use her Oswego education in creative ways.

Andrea, who holds an Oswego master’s degree in teaching chemistry and spent a 20-plus year career as a science teacher in the United States, now volunteers in an after-school program, sharing science enrichment activities with bilingual Japanese elementary school students.

It all began for Andrea with her involvement with the College Women’s Association of Japan. This group of Japanese and American college women first banded together in 1949 as a service club to provide scholarships to Japanese students attending American universities. Today its membership is equally divided between international expatriate and Japanese women who share culture and customs while raising money for their scholarship fund.

From there, she became involved in the Children’s English Circle.

Since her interest lies in teaching, she toured a Japanese public middle school, and a private, women-only school, which invited her to an open house.

“In the public school, I noticed the chemistry lab and classroom for seventh and eighth graders had no visuals — not even a periodic table,” remembers Andrea.

The instruction consisted entirely of a lecture, delivered by a stiff, formal teacher speaking from a podium at the front of the classroom.

Andrea resolved then and there to introduce the students to the fun of science. She volunteered to bring in hands-on science experiments for the children.

“They loved making ice cream,” she recalls, referencing an activity designed to teach the children about melting points and how adding salt lowers the freezing point so the ice cream freezes.

“The children were fun to work with,” she says. “They were so willing to learn and pay attention.”

Another time she made models of molecules in class. Materials are harder to come by in Japan. There are no big discount stores to get supplies all in one place, and you have to go to several different shops. So Andrea often shops back home in Painted Post and brings her craft supplies to Japan in her carry-on. That time, the modeling clay and wire for the molecule caused a bit of a stir at airport security.

Another project included students making a working lung model out of a plastic bottle and a balloon. She was thrilled when one of the children used the model lung for show-and-tell back in her home classroom.

Hands-on instruction is nothing new for Andrea. Mentored by Distinguished Teaching Professor of Chemistry Emeritus Augustine Silveira, she spent plenty of time in Snygg Hall labs.

“I wouldn’t have gone on for a master’s at Oswego, if not for Dr. Silveira,” she recalls. He called the promising undergrad chemistry major and said, “I have one scholarship left!”

Everyday life can be an adventure in a foreign land, Andrea acknowledges. Because they have no car there, she must do the grocery shopping four or five times a week, carrying the bags home through the Tokyo streets.

She has learned some Japanese language and is trying out some Japanese recipes she learned in local cooking classes.

“As an expat I could just spend my time at the American Club, have only American friends,” she says. “But I have taken the opportunity for a variety of activities, making friends with Japanese women.

“It’s enriching — better than trying to recreate the American experience here.”

Through her generous gift of time, she is also enriching the lives of budding young scientists.